I stopped playing both GTA IV and GTA V because I hated the characters so much. I’m not a big fan of open world type games as is, so when the characters and narrative don’t appeal to me, I can’t force myself to enjoy something I just don’t. Honestly, Niko and Roman were way worse than GTA V’s characters, where I at least liked Michael and got a kick out of Trevor. I didn’t mind Franklin as much when he was with them, but when he was with Lamar, the N-bombs and ghetto talk was too much of a turn off to the point where I wanted to turn off the game.

Well not so much a single character but sets of characters in a game. Like Anthony, I don’t think I have ever liked any of the characters in any of the GTA games, so they def. get a mention from me. Let’s face it, they are horrible characters that are only saved because America loves to run around, kill anyone that moves, run from the cops, and sleep with whores. This is a big reason why Sleeping Dogs in my mind is a vastly superior game to GTA. Another cast of characters that really did me in was FFIX, where they went for the pedophile route and made all the characters like 8 years old and annoying as shit. I would rather spend hours listening to Wakka from FFX talk than spend another minute in FFIX.

While there hasn’t been a character that I have hated enough to be the sole cause of stopping me from continuing in a game, there have been plenty of characters that have ruined the experience for me. The most blatantly obvious in my mind is the awful Niko Bellic from GTA IV, though I know there are many other games that I have tried to purge from my mind over the years due to my loathing for the main characters. More often than not, my hatred for a character will stop me from even playing a game in the first place, rather than once I’ve already started playing.

I really can’t think of any game that has had a character that has made me want to stop playing, usually games lack enough character development to give any one person enough power to make me want to walk away. But, if the writing is dry or bad enough, I will focus more on the gameplay and ignore the story and only if that is bad too, will I generally stop – that is, unless I am doing the review =X.

My choosing to stop playing was compounded by quite a few other factors, but I’d have to say PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. One of the reasons I was so excited for PS All-Stars included the chance to play as Jak, possibly my favorite character from the PS2 days. When I finally chose him to go through the ‘story’ mode, I was shocked and appalled by the new voice actor that ruined the character of Jak for me. While I still played All-Stars for some time after this, I just couldn’t go back and choose Jak.

While there’s never been a character I absolutely hated, the heavy use of the ghetto talk and N word dropping in GTA V makes me want to never play as Franklin. He seems okay as long as he’s alone, but throw in Lamar and he’s a totally different person. Keep in mind that I’m hard of hearing and use captions to follow the storylines of games, so every time they used the N word, it was being said in my head. It seemed gratuitous to the point of over offending to me.